Hi, I’m changing Post Mortem format a little bit, but if you have Immortal questions, feel free to ask them. I have reread all of Immortal taking notes and am dissecting what worked and what didn’t and giving some interesting tidbits on the way.
The first thing to say is that IMMORTAL (Internally referred to as “NOCTURNAL MAGIC”) had a great deal of revisions. My main goal with this was to have an adventuring party, somewhere around this magic college. Early versions revolved around Fire Afflicted animals, or an ancient artifact being brought to the university. But ultimately I settled on the lich due to it intersecting with another desire of mine, to explain “Dust Affliction”. Both these revisions and wanting to talk about things like Dust Affliction influenced the story a lot, but we’ll cover that later.
Also, I wanted to explore lore questions early on like if animals could be Afflicted
Eventually these desires for world questions gave way to a desire to tell character stories instead, Anther previously being the least featured of all the girls got way more attention. And what was once lighthearted adventure where the four of them smoke “hashnip” in the forest, became IMMORTAL instead.
But enough what the comic used to be lets get into what the comic is! The first thing I noticed re-reading IMMORTAL is how detailed and rich the backgrounds for the university is, especially for a place we leave almost immediately. I think this is just leftover thinking from The Cage; I started the first comic similarly, but you spent all of that in the Cage. In a mobile setting like IMMORTAL, that sort of detail should be spread all over the countryside.
It’s always interesting to see old art, I feel like my character consistency has improved over this run a lot. It’s funny to see me not be able to decide whether I want Anther’s jaw to be square or round in early pages.
Moving into the dinner, it’s fun to see how stealthily Azalea eats Rhodes meal during the dinner. Something I could honestly talk about at any point in this is how much sitting down to talk there is in this comic, it’s something I want to work on, having more interesting visual language over conversation. Or just being able to have less of it all together!
Looking at the tavern in the first town now. I really wish I integrated Sprout a lot better, I had a list of things about the world I wanted to get through. Bardic weapons, Dust Affliction, and the Godless. Sprout became a victim of crossing off this checklist. The main party of Anther Azalea and Rhode was too tight, it needed some conflict and differing opinions especially to challenge Anthers views to change sooner.
One thing I really enjoyed doing was non-violent conflict scenes, some of my favorite stuff is Anther charming people, and how it really evolved over the comic. From complete failure with the snake, to a sneak attack with Kass, to a straight up con with sprout, it was lots of fun.
There is a huge lack of focus in a lot of conversations. I think came from pulling in elements from earlier revisions of this story. These things may be relevant to the character but are no longer relevant to the plot. Azalea talks about becoming a mage to cure Rhode, which is a lot more relevant to the version of the plot where Azalea takes the Phylactary at the end.
I’m surprised how lighthearted early parts of this story is, it really starts to feel more like Nocturnal near the end for me. Anther is so different when she is alone and Sprout really challenges that other half of the party. I think this is partially to do with how long it took to finish this, I was just in a different place at that point, we all were I think.
The lich fight is probably my favorite fight I’ve done, It’s the first time I thought about the “Story” of the fight. Showing neither sprout nor the lich will die from hitting each other, the lich calling in minions as a different way of winning. Anther killing the Lich then having to deal with Sprout who could very easily take everyone in that room. It was a good way of thinking about it.
This has honestly been the comic where I started noticing things like this on, before I was just doing whatever I thought and hoping it turns out okay, but I’m starting to feel comfortable with stories as craft. Hopefully, I’ll bring everything I learned here to the next stories
